Arrested, incarcerated, stripped, and drugged -- after calling 988Lifeline
Is this how to save lives?
Steve* is a big strapping guy, well over six foot. He used to work in aircraft maintenance and his life seemed relatively stable. But every once in a while things got too much for him, and then he would call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline (NSPL) just to have someone to talk to, even though he was never actually suicidal.
One day, during his lunch break, he was feeling “pretty down,” in his words, and decided to call NSPL. He spoke with a call attendant for around ten minutes and then hung up to get back to work.
Twenty minutes later, police showed up at the hangar where he worked. He hadn’t even given the call attendant his name, let alone his location. And he hadn’t mentioned suicide to anyone, at any point. But the officers claimed they’d been told he was in imminent danger of his life, and they escorted him to an ambulance.
Steve was mortified.
It was really embarrassing and traumatizing. All my coworkers and my lead and supervisor, they saw me get taken away.
He was brought to a veterans’ hospital where he was detained in “absolutely miserable” conditions. Fortunately, his brother-in-law managed to get him released that same day.
But he was left with a $1,050 ambulance bill, not to mention the emotional scars of his experience. Even though he was cleared by a doctor for returning to work, three months later, he lost his job with no adequate explanation.
The hotline was the most reliable place for me to get help when I needed it, and now I feel I can’t trust that place anymore.
Government takes over crisis hotlines and the results are...
Steve isn’t alone in what he went through. Probably over a million people have had similar experiences in the past two years, since the NSPL became 988Lifeline. Today, around 200 call centers are part of the 988 network, and while several hundred other crisis hotlines have yet to join, most of them follow the same general guidelines when it comes to summoning police or emergency services. Samaritans of NYC and the Wildflower Alliance are two of the very few crisis hotlines that never trace callers without their explicit consent.
988Lifeline was established in 2022 and is run by Vibrant Emotional Health (Vibrant), which won the federal contract from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). Over a billion taxpayer dollars have been invested in creating a centralized crisis call center and encouraging private hotlines to join.
Ostensibly, the idea is to save lives. Success is hard to measure given that data on suicides over the past few years aren’t yet available. The American Psychological Association (APA) cites an evaluation showing that 80 percent of callers say that they have been deterred from committing suicide — but their template for call attendants is strikingly different from what Steve and thousands of others have experienced. The APA writes that,
The lifeline uses an established model of call flow that includes establishing rapport with the caller, asking about immediate risk of suicide, listening to the caller’s story, collaborating with him or her on a safety plan, and offering follow-up as needed. Follow-up calls take place 24 to 48 hours after the initial call and continue until the caller is connected to longer term services, no longer feels at risk, or says he or she doesn’t need further support.
The 80-percent success claim is based on follow-up calls from the call attendant, not a follow-up visit by the police, complete with handcuffs.
'I'm never calling again'
If you ask therapists or other mental health professionals, they’ll often play down the likelihood of being taken into psychiatric custody following a call to a crisis hotline. Kati Morton, who calls herself a “mental health professional,” recorded a video for her followers after someone asked her, “What happens when you call the suicide hotline?”
They will ask you... do a basic suicide assessment. They’ll ask: Do you have a plan? What are your thoughts like? How long has this been going on? And then they’ll just try to talk you down...
Nothing really happens,
she claims. But then she adds,
If they’re really worried for your safety they’re going to try to find out where you live because they’re going to want to send a psychiatric evaluation team, people who call to make sure … that they’re okay. They just want to keep you safe, it’s nothing scary, they’re not going to force you into doing anything, just ask you a bunch of questions, they just want to make sure that you’re okay...
Morton then asks for comments below the video, since “a lot of you have been helped” by such hotlines. There are almost two thousand comments, overwhelmingly expressing frustration, anger, disappointment, and feelings of betrayal after calling for help only to have police turn up on their doorstep.
I’m never calling ever again, called once the guy was so sweet I opened up quickly never once did I say I was suicidal next thing I know 3 police cars and 2 ambulances banging at the door. Next thing I know I’m the in back of a police car being transported over to some psych ward they ruined my family all I needed was to talk now my family doesn’t trust me…
Some responders pointed out that the whole point of a crisis hotline is to get confidential support and that the “imminent risk” intervention policy defeats the entire purpose:
If they can track your number … then exactly what is the motive to calling the hotline? Obviously, a person calls in order to avoid hospitalization.
For many, especially those living with family members but feel, for whatever reason, unable to confide in those relatives, the purpose has already been defeated:
I want to call the help line but I don’t want to go to jail or a psych ward. I just want to talk to someone who isn’t my parents…
Call attendants with just two days of training...
In a report to Congress in April of this year, SAMHSA admitted that it has “no research” to validate its intervention policy. In fact, research over the past decades has consistently shown that even the “experts” are astonishingly bad at predicting who will commit suicide, regardless of what people say or refrain from saying. At least one meta-study showed that a coin-toss would be almost as good in terms of prediction.
Furthermore, call attendants describe training that lasts just two half-days, including two hours devoted to making risk assessments. Some claim that the decision to ask 911 for call tracing is based more on the attendant’s nervousness than the actual condition of the caller. Naturally, no one wants to keep everything confidential only to find out that someone took their life, but many anecdotal reports suggest that call attendants seem to be fishing for a statement that could be used to “determine” suicidality so that they can claim “imminent risk” and get 911 involved.
... and they are the ones who introduce the idea of suicide
Natasha* called 988Lifeline when she was feeling, in her words, “depressed and kind of wishing that I might just die. I wanted to talk to another person and maybe be reassured a little.”
I didn’t feel like [the call attendant] was really hearing me. She was kind of using canned responses. [She asked me,] “If you were going to kill yourself, when would you do it? And how would you do it?”
I just kind of gave her the first answer that popped into my head. I thought it was kind of a weird thing for them to be asking me, because isn’t the goal to try to talk me out of committing suicide, instead of helping me make a plan?
Next, the call attendant suggested Natasha should head immediately to a psychiatric hospital, but Natasha replied that she had a class soon. Then the call attendant wanted to send police out, but Natasha said it wasn’t necessary. The call attendant responded. “The police can determine that.” Natasha panicked and hung up.
Fifteen minutes later, police and an ambulance arrived at her home.
Natasha was strapped to a stretcher and taken to a psychiatric hospital where she was forced to strip completely with several people watching. She was placed in a small room furnished with nothing but a bed, and left there from half-past-eight at night until half-past-eight the next morning, without anyone telling her what was going on.
Finally, a social worker turned up.
I was terrified. [He] diagnosed me with bipolar disorder. I don’t know where he got that from. And he was trying to make it sound like I told them I had tried to overdose prior to calling the hotline. And I was saying, “No, that’s not what I said at all.” And he told me that now I was lying.
Exhausted after a sleepless, panic-stricken night, Natasha was told she would be detained in the psychiatric unit for evaluation. She was also given two different psychiatric drugs and told to attend group therapy. When her 72-hour hold expired, she was told that unless she signed herself in voluntarily for further treatment, a court application would be made to hold her.
[Going to court] has very serious career implications, because when something like that goes to court, you’re introducing it into the public record. I knew that I had to avoid going to court at all costs, and my only way to do that was to sign myself involuntarily… There was nothing voluntary about this.
Two weeks later, Natasha was finally discharged — with a hospital bill for $50,000.
Over a million police to 'save lives' (and how many to fight crime?)
988Lifeline hasn’t released any data on how often they summon police or EMS, but they claim that this happens to less than two percent of callers. Some regions cite other figures, such as New Mexico, where 3.5 percent of those who call their Crisis and Access Line have police or EMS summoned as a consequence. It’s important to note that this is 3.5 percent of all callers, including many who make no mention of suicide or even any serious issue at all. In fact, only 27 percent of their calls are related to suicidal feelings, meaning that the intervention rate for these callers is closer to 15 percent.
According to a new national survey, police or EMS are summoned for around 8 percent of callers. However, a further 17 percent of callers have a “mobile crisis team” turn up outside their home following a call, and in many cases they too will be taken to a psychiatric hospital.
Considering that in 988Lifeline’s first year alone, over 5.2 million people called their hotlines, this means that police or EMS have been summoned to “check up on” around a million people since then.
Involuntary hospitalization is a massive suicide risk factor
If checking up on a million people translated to thousands of lives saved, nobody would have any complaints. Unfortunately, the opposite is more likely to be the truth. A large study following 100,000 people conducted between 1996 and 2017 found that during the first few days after being discharged from a psychiatric hospital, people suffering from depression are 330 times more likely than the average person to commit suicide.
Furthermore, the lack of having a solid plan for support after discharge was associated with a higher suicide rate. As the APA notes, follow-up is extremely important for the vulnerable. However, as many reports show, people who were involuntarily admitted to a psychiatric hospital after a call to a crisis hotline are a) usually abandoned after discharge (especially since many were never actively suicidal at all) and b) so suspicious of interventions following their experience that they shy away from any future contact with mental health services.
Then there’s c) people who weren’t suicidal before their crisis call, but become suicidal after being betrayed, as they interpret it, by the only person they thought they could trust.
Go to the hospital or we're coming to get you
Cathy* is a law student in her early twenties. She has been in therapy for a while due to her adolescent experiences of being stalked and assaulted. At one point, her therapist suggested using 988 for times when she just wanted a listening ear.
I just wanted somebody to walk me through those flashbacks and do things like grounding techniques or breathing exercises. It’s just really nice to have another person as an anchor.
One day, when she was having a tough time, Cathy called 988Lifeline. She talked about her feelings with the call attendant, who listened and offered support for around ten minutes — and then she asked Cathy where she lived. Not suspecting anything at this point, Cathy told her which city she lived in, only to have the call transferred to a local call center.
The new call attendant was aggressive in her approach and demanded her name and address, which, given her background of suffering from stalking, was traumatic and played on her vulnerability. She also asked Cathy “over and over again” if she was suicidal.
I wasn’t, but I might have said something like “I want all of this to stop,” meaning the flashbacks, because I was having severe flashbacks throughout this [call]. And she just kept pressing this issue of suicidality [and how I would do it]. I felt like I needed to answer. I felt like I couldn’t hang up. In the situations that I have been in with predators, I often found that the path of least resistance was the path that led to the least pain; so, you do what they want.
Cathy didn’t realize that the call attendant was putting her through a risk assessment, or that replying with some kind of plan to kill herself would put her in a high-risk category. She told the call attendant that she might jump from a high-rise or overdose on pills (even though she didn’t have any pills to overdose on). The response was quick in coming: Cathy was told to head immediately to a psychiatric facility.
She told me that if I did not come in, she would have to send the police to my house. [So I went, because] I very much did not want the police to come and drag me out of my apartment.
At the facility, Cathy had her belongings taken away, including her phone, and was locked in a tiny room with no daylight for hours. Later, she was strapped to a gurney and taken to a psychiatric hospital where she was ordered to sign intake forms.
One of the forms was whether I was allowing myself to be admitted voluntarily or whether it was an involuntary admission.
Like many others trapped in this situation, Cathy was told that if she refused to agree to a “voluntary” stay, she would be confined for longer. She signed her agreement.
Then followed four nightmarish days when Cathy was unable to sleep at night as the door to her room had no lock and she still suffered from the stalking trauma. By day, all the inmates, male and female, were confined in a common room where sexual harassment was frequent.
“I wasn’t suicidal going in, but I sure was coming out,” Cathy recounts. She still has nightmares.
* not their real name
To be continued...
The information contained in this article is for educational and information purposes only and is not intended as health, medical, financial or legal advice. Always consult a physician, lawyer or other qualified professional regarding any questions you may have about a medical condition, health objectives, or legal issues. If you are struggling with suicidal thoughts, you can call a qualified free mental health helpline or seek help from a qualified therapist.
